James R. Cothran and  Erica Danylchak
Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetery Movement

University of South Carolina Press, January 2018

This beautifully illustrated volume features more than 150 historic photographs, stereographs, postcards, engravings, maps, and contemporary images that illuminate the origins of rural cemeteries, their physical evolution, and the nature of the landscapes they inspired. Extended profiles of twenty-four rural cemeteries reveal the evolving design features of this distinctive landscape genre before and after the American Civil War, facilitating their identification and preservation. In addition, Grave Landscapes places rural cemeteries in the broader context of American landscape design, thereby illuminating their influence on the creation of public parks.

The late James R. Cothran was a landscape architect, urban planner, and garden historian in Atlanta, Georgia, where he served as an adjunct professor of garden history and preservation at the University of Georgia and Georgia State University. A fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Cothran is the author of Gardens of Historic Charleston, Charleston Gardens and the Landscape Legacy of Loutrel Briggs, and the award-winning Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South.

Erica Danylchak holds degrees in history from Boston University and heritage preservation from Georgia State University. She has worked in archival science at the Cherokee Garden Library and the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, and in preservation as executive director of the Buckhead Heritage Society. Danylchak served as a research fellow for the Georgia Historic Landscape Initiative and in 2009 received the Jenny D. Thurston Memorial Award from the Atlanta Urban Design Commission.

Sonja Dümpelmann
Seeing Trees:  A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin

Yale University Press,  January 2019

Today cities around the  globe are planting street trees to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, as landscape historian Sonja Dümpelmann explains, this is not a new phenomenon. Focusing on two cities in the nineteenth century – New York City and Berlin –  she discusses the planting of trees to improve the urban climate and how this practice affected the larger social, cultural, and political aspects of urban life.

Sonja Dümpelmann is a landscape historian and associate professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is the author of Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design (2014) and a book on the pioneering twentieth-century Italian landscape architect Maria Teresa Parpagliolo Shephard (2004). In addition, she served as editor of A Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire (2013) and coeditor with Dorothee Brantz of Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (2011).

Hansjörg Gadient,  Sophie von Schwerin, and Simon Orga
Migge: The Original Landscape Designs Die Originalen Gartenpläne 1910-1920

Birkhäuser, October 2018

“Gardens for everyman!” was the central credo of Leberecht Migge (1881–1935), one of the most influential landscape architects of the twentieth century. His estate was thought to be lost until the discovery of more than three hundred original plans and drawings in the Archives of Swiss Landscape Architecture. This book presents numerous projects, many previously unknown, ranging from large-scale plans for housing settlements to detailed designs for luxurious private gardens. Introductions to the historical period and to Migge’s ideas put the plans in context. Indices of persons, places, and plant names complement the text and illustrations. Two plans, reprinted at original size, accompany this volume.

Hansjörg Gadient is an architect, landscape architect, and professor at Rapperswil University of Applied Sciences (HSR), where he teaches the design and planning of urban open space in the bachelor’s and master’s study programs.

Sophie von Schwerin is a gardener, landscape architect, and historian of garden art who joined the Institute for Landscape and Open Space at the HSR in 2012 and has served as curator at the Archives of Swiss Landscape Architecture since 2015.

Simon Orga is an architect who joined the staff at the Institute for Landscape and Open Space at the HSR in 2012 and has been a member of the team of the Archives of Swiss Landscape Architecture since 2015.

Victoria Johnson
American Eden:  David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic

Liveright, June 2018

American Eden tells the forgotten story of David Hosack, a young New Yorker who set out to put his raw, commercial city on the scientific and cultural map of the United States. In  1801, on twenty acres of Manhattan farmland, Hosack founded the first public botanical garden in the new nation, amassing a spectacular collection of medicinal, agricultural, and ornamental plants.

Victoria Johnson is a former Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and an associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College in New York City. She teaches on the history of philanthropy, nonprofits, and New York City. She holds a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Yale.

Catherine Seavitt  Nordenson
Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship

University of Texas Press, April 2018

In this book the author explores a pivotal moment in the preeminent modernist landscape architect’s career: the years in which he was an appointed member of the Federal Cultural Council in Brazil. While serving on this advisory panel created by the country’s military dictatorship in the mid-1960s, Burle Marx authored eighteen environmental position pieces. Together with her translation Seavitt Nordenson presents pertinent examples of Burle Marx’s public projects in Brazil – several of which were commissioned by the military regime. Depositions offers new insight into Burle Marx’s outstanding landscape oeuvre and elucidates his transition from prolific designer to prescient political counselor.

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson is an associate professor of landscape architecture at CUNY’s City College of New York and principal of Catherine Seavitt Studio. Her research focuses on design adaptation to sea-level rise in urban coastal environments and explores landscape-restoration practices within the dynamics of climate change.

Judith B. Tankard
Ellen Shipman and the American Garden

University of Georgia Press, May 2018

Between 1914 and 1950, Ellen Shipman (1869–1950) designed more than six hundred gardens, from Long Island’s Gold Coast to the state of Washington. Her secluded, lush, formal gardens attracted a clientele that included the Fords, Edisons, Astors, and du Ponts. Shipman’s imaginative approach merged elements of the Colonial Revival and Arts and Crafts movements with a unique planting style enlivened by impressionistic washes of color. Richly illustrated with plans and photographs, the book explores Shipman’s ability to create intimate spaces through dense plantings, evocative water features, and ornament. This updated edition of a book first published in 1996 includes many newly discovered gardens as well as color photographs of surviving gardens, such as those at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens and Tranquillity Farm.

Judith B. Tankard is a landscape historian, author, and preservation consultant. She received an M.A. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and taught at the Landscape Institute of Harvard University for over twenty years.

Dean Cardasis
James Rose

University of Georgia Press, March 2017

James Rose, the first biography of this important landscape architect, explores the work of one of the most radical figures in the history of mid-century modernist American landscape design. An artist who furthered his profession with both words and built works, Rose fearlessly critiqued the developing patterns of land use he witnessed during a period of rapid suburban development. The alternatives he offered in his designs for hundreds of gardens were based on innovative and iconoclastic environmental and philosophic principles, some of which have become mainstream today.  The book includes new scholarship on many important works, including the Dickenson Garden in Pasadena and the Averett House in Columbus, Georgia, as well as unpublished correspondence. In letters to his mother, Rose reveals a tenderness toward nature and faith in spiritual harmony that belies his reputation as an alienated social critic. Throughout his career Rose refined his conservation ethic, seeing recycled materials and waste reduction as opportunities to create landscapes for contemplation, self-discovery, and pleasure. At a time when issues of economy and environmentalism are even more pressing, Rose’s writings and projects are both relevant and revelatory.

Kenneth I. Helphand
Lawrence Halprin

University of Georgia Press, 2017

During a career spanning six decades, Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009) became one of the most prolific and outspoken landscape architects of his generation. He took on challenging new project types, developing a multidisciplinary practice while experimenting with adaptive reuse and ecological designs for new shopping malls, the freeway, and urban parks. In his lifelong effort to improve the American landscape, Halprin celebrated the creative process as a form of social activism.

After earning his design degree at Harvard, Halprin moved West and in 1945 joined Thomas Church’s firm. He opened his own San Francisco office in 1949, where he initially focused on residential commissions in the Bay Area. By the 1960s the firm had gained recognition for significant urban renewal projects such as Ghirardelli Square (1962–68), Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis (1962–67), Seattle’s Freeway Park (1970–74), and the Portland, Oregon, Open Space Sequence (1965–78).

A charismatic speaker and passionate artist, Halprin designed landscapes that reflected the democratic and participatory ethic of his era. Throughout his long career, he strived as well to develop poetic and symbolic landscapes that, in his words, could “articulate a culture’s most spiritual values.”

Alison Isenberg

Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay

Princeton University Press, August 2017

Previous accounts of mid-century urban renewal have focused on the opposing terms set down by Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs – put simply, development versus preservation—and have followed New York City models. Designing San Francisco is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid other clashing visions of the future. In this richly illustrated book, Alison Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners – those most often hailed in histories of urban development and desig – to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s.

Designing San Francisco offers an insightful discussion of how, when large-scale redevelopment came to low-rise San Francisco in the 1950s, the resulting rivalries and conflicts sparked the proliferation of numerous allied arts fields and their professionals These included architectural model makers, real estate publicists, graphic designers, photographers, property managers, builders, sculptors, public-interest lawyers, alternative press writers, and preservationists. Isenberg explores how these professionals brought new concepts to city, regional, and national planning as they shaped novel projects across urban, suburban, and rural borders. In addition , she discusses how San Francisco’s rebuilding program galvanized far-reaching critiques of the inequitable competition for scarce urban land and propelled debates over responsible public land stewardship. She further challenges many truisms of this renewal era – especially the presumed male domination of postwar urban design, showing how women collaborated in city building long before feminism’s impact in the 1970s.

Alison Isenberg is professor of history at Princeton University, where she codirects the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. She is the author of Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It.

Robin Karson, Jane Roy Brown, Sarah Allaback (eds.)
Warren H. Manning: Landscape Architect and Environmental Planner

University of Georgia Press, April 2017

Warren H. Manning’s (1860–1938) national practice comprised more than sixteen hundred landscape design and planning projects throughout North America, from small home grounds to estates, cemeteries, college campuses, parks and park systems, and new industrial towns. Manning approached his design and planning projects from an environmental perspective, conceptualizing projects as components of larger regional (in some cases, national) systems, a method that contrasted sharply with those of his stylistically oriented colleagues. In this regard, as in many others, Manning had been influenced by his years with the Olmsted firm, where the foundations of his resource-based approach to design were forged. Manning’s overlay map methods, later adopted by the renowned landscape architect Ian McHarg, provided the basis for computer mapping software in widespread use today.

One of the eleven founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Manning also ran one of the nation’s largest offices, where he trained several influential designers, including Fletcher Steele, A. D. Taylor, Charles Gillette, and Dan Kiley. After Manning’s death, his reputation slipped into obscurity. Contributors to the Warren H. Manning Research Project have worked more than a decade to assess current conditions of his built projects and to compile a richly illustrated compendium of site essays that illuminate the range, scope, and significance of Manning’s notable career with specially commissioned photographs by Carol Betsch.

Brian McCammack
Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago

Harvard University Press, October 2017

Most historians map the integration of southern and northern black culture through labor, religion, politics, and popular culture. Landscapes of Hope is the first interdisciplinary history to frame the African-American Great Migration as environmental experience. Situated during the period between 1915 and 1940 at the intersection of race and place in American history, this book focuses on Chicago’s parks and beaches as well as youth camps, vacation resorts, and the farms and forests of the rural Midwest. Here we learn how, in spite of persistent racial discrimination and violence in many of these places during the time when hundreds of thousands of African Americans were moving away from the South to begin new lives in the urban North, Chicago’s black community – women and men, young and old, working class and upper class – forged material and imaginative connections to nature as they sought out, fought for, built, and enjoyed an opportunity to realize the promise of nature and public recreation.

Micki McElya
The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery

Harvard University Press, August 2016

Arlington National Cemetery is considered by many to be America’s most sacred shrine, a destination for four million visitors who each year tour its grounds and honor those buried there. As Micki McElya shows, no site in the United States has played a stronger political role in shaping national identity. With its 400,000 graves sited on a rolling hillside overlooking Washington, D.C on a former plantation built by slave labor, Arlington commemorates sacrifices made in all the nation’s armed conflicts since the Civil War. It is also a place that symbolizes the boundaries of citizenship and the various meanings of honor and love of country.

The cemetery’s most famous monument was erected in 1921: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which marks the interment of a single World War I unidentified combatant. As a century of wars abroad secured Arlington’s centrality in the American imagination, more “Unknowns” joined the first to be buried at this shrine. In revealing how Arlington encompasses both inspiring and shameful aspects of American history, McElya enriches the story of this landscape, demonstrating that remembering the past must go hand in hand with reckoning with the consequences of history.

Alona Nitzan-Shiftan
Seizing Jerusalem: The Architectures of Unilateral Unification

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

After seizing Jerusalem’s eastern precincts from Jordan at the conclusion of the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel unilaterally unified the city and plunged into an ambitious building program, eager to transform the very meaning of one of the world’s most emotionally charged urban spaces. The goal was as simple as it was controversial: to both Judaize and modernize Jerusalem.

Seizing Jerusalem chronicles how numerous disciplines, including architecture, landscape design, and urban planning, as well as everyone from municipal politicians to state bureaucrats, from Israeli-born architects to international luminaries such as Louis Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, and Bruno Zevi, competed to create Jerusalem’s new image. This decade-long competition happened with the Palestinian residents still living in the city, even as the new image was inspired by the city’s Arab legacy. The politics of space in the Holy City, still contested today, were shaped in this post-1967 decade not only by the legacy of the war and the politics of dispossession, but curiously also by emerging trends in postwar architectural culture.

Drawing on previously unexamined archival documents and in-depth interviews with architects, planners, and politicians, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan analyzes the cultural politics of the Israeli state and, in particular, of Jerusalem’s influential mayor, Teddy Kollek, whose efforts to legitimate Israeli rule over Jerusalem provided architects a unique, real-world laboratory to explore the possibilities and limits of modernist design – as built form as well as political and social action. Seizing Jerusalem reveals architecture as an active agent in the formation of urban and national identity, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about Zionism, and the crisis within the discipline of architecture over postwar modernism, affected Jerusalem’s built environment in ways that continue to resonate today.

Laurie Olin
Be Seated

Applied Research and Design Publishing, an imprint of ORO Editions, 2017

This book consists of a series of essays that begin with the author’s personal discovery of public seating. An ‘ah ha’ moment as a young architect visiting Paris and his early experience as a designer is followed by a brief history of the evolution of public space and seating in the West. This is followed by an account of some of his experiments as a landscape architect, and the theory, craft, and role of seating in a number of prominent civic places his firm and others have designed in the past four decades. Along the way there are reflections on the author’s interest in chairs, seating, public space, and aspects of the profession of landscape architecture.  
Accompanying the essays there are sketches, and watercolors made by Olin over time while travelling or working that weren’t originally intended as book illustrations. Some are quick, hasty notes of something observed; others are more careful studies with, on occasion, measurements. Some were made leisurely while enjoying a felicitous moment or place, while others record the author puzzling through a particular design problem. Each in some way exemplifies aspects of the essays helping to articulate or sharpen the author’s insights and point of view – those of a designer, not a historian or critic. They offer an alternative presentation of the topics raised, and a dialogue between writing and image – whether one of contrast, or at times, contrast.

Marc Treib
Landscapes of Modern Architecture: Wright, Mies, Neutra, Aalto, Barragán

Yale University Press, January 2017

This book provides an authoritative study of the interrelationship between modern architecture, landscape, and site strategy as viewed through the work of five prominent architects – Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), Richard Neutra (1892–1970), Alvar Aalto (1898–1976), and Luis Barragán (1902–1988. Exploring a range of architectural, philosophical, and theoretical approaches, he investigates their site strategies with regard to considerations of climate, topography, and existing vegetation.

The character of the sites on which these architects worked dramatically affected their architecture and gardens, a fact illustrated by Wright’s “organic” regard of the desert; Mies’s evolving divorce of building from terrain; Neutra’s transformation of the “realities” of the site; Aalto’s use of the forest metaphor and interior landscapes; and Barragán’s architectonic conversion of the land. Richly illustrated with rarely published archival drawings and plans, accompanied by the author’s own exceptional photographs, this book presents the spectrum of architectural responses to the constraints of site, climate, client, program, building material, region, and nation. Taken as a group, the work of these five architects sheds important light on the consideration and influence of the site and landscape on the practice of architecture during the 20th century.

Marc Treib is professor of architecture emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

Diane Waggoner With Russell Lord and Jennifer Raab
East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography

Yale University Press, March 2017

This important reconsideration of landscape photography in 19th-century America explores crucial but neglected geographies, practitioners, and themes. It heightens awareness of the many photographers working in the eastern half of the United States during the same period as their more famous counterparts were capturing striking images of the West. To date, their works, with the exception of Civil War images, have received relatively scant attention. Redressing this imbalance, East of the Mississippi is the first book to focus exclusively on another body of photographs that helped shape the public’s consciousness of an American national identity. Celebrating natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the White Mountains as well as capturing a cultural landscape fundamentally altered by industrialization, these images also documented the impact of war, promoted tourism, and played a role in an emerging environmentalism.  
Showcasing more than 180 photographs from 1839 to 1900 in a rich variety of media and formats  – from daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, tintypes, cyanotypes, and albumen prints to stereo cards and photograph albums – this volume exemplifies many of the inventions in the art of photography during period.

Diane Waggoner is curator of 19th-century photographs at the National Gallery of Art. Russell Lord is the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Jennifer Raab is assistant professor of the history of art at Yale University. 

Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo
Ecologies of Power: Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense

MIT Press, 2016

From the publisher:
This book is not about war, nor is it a history of war. Avoiding the shock and awe of wartime images, it explores the contemporary spatial configurations of power camouflaged in the infrastructures, environments, and scales of military operations. Instead of wartime highs, this book starts with drawdown lows, when demobilization and decommissioning morph into realignment and prepositioning. It is in this transitional milieu that the full material magnitudes and geographic entanglements of contemporary militarism are laid bare. Through this perpetual cycle of build up and breakdown, the U.S. Department of Defense – the single largest developer, landowner, equipment contractor, and energy consumer in the world – has engineered a planetary assemblage of “operational environments” in which militarized, demilitarized, and non-militarized landscapes are increasingly inextricable.

In a series of critical cartographic essays, Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo trace this footprint far beyond the battlefield, countermapping the geographies of U.S. militarism across five of the most important and embattled operational environments: the ocean, the atmosphere, the highway, the city, and the desert. From the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia to the defense-contractor archipelago around Washington, D.C.; from the A01 Highway circling Afghanistan’s high-altitude steppe to surveillance satellites pinging the planet from low-earth orbit; and from the vast cold chain conveying military perishables worldwide to the global constellation of military dumps, sinks, and scrapyards, the book unearths the logistical infrastructures and residual landscapes that render strategy spatial, militarism material, and power operational. In so doing, Bélanger and Arroyo reveal unseen ecologies of power at work in the making and unmaking of environments – operational, built, and otherwise – to come.

Pierre Bélanger, a landscape architect and urbanist, is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and the coauthor of Ecologies of Power: Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense (MIT Press) and Landscape as Infrastructure.

Alexander Arroyo is a doctoral student in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

Timothy Davis
National Park Roads: A Legacy in the American Landscape

The University of Virginia Press, 2016

From the publisher:
From Acadia and Great Smoky Mountains to Zion and Mount Rainier, millions of visitors tour America’s national parks. While park roads determine what most visitors see and how they see it, however, few pause to consider when, why, or how the roads they travel on were built. In this extensively researched and richly illustrated book, national parks historian Timothy Davis highlights the unique qualities of park roads, details the factors influencing their design and development, and examines their role in shaping the national park experience – from the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive to Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road, Yellowstone's Grand Loop, Yosemite's Tioga Road, and scores of other scenic drives.

Decisions about park road development epitomize the central challenge of park management: balancing preservation and access in America’s most treasured landscapes. Park roads have been celebrated as technical and aesthetic masterpieces, hailed as democratizing influences, and vilified for invading pristine wilderness with the sights, sounds, and smells of civilization. Davis’s recounting of efforts to balance the interests of motorists, wilderness advocates, highway engineers, and other stakeholders offers a fresh perspective on national park history while providing insights into evolving ideas about the role of nature, recreation, and technology in American society.

Tales of strong personalities, imposing challenges, resounding controversies, and remarkable achievements enliven this rich and compelling narrative. Key players include many of the most important figures of conservation history – John Muir, Frederick Law Olmsted, wilderness advocates Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and Ansel Adams, and NPS directors Stephen Mather and Horace Albright among them. An engrossing history, National Park Roads will be of interest to national park enthusiasts, academics, design professionals, resource managers, and readers concerned with the past, present, and future of this quintessentially American legacy. As the National Park Service celebrates its centennial, this book offers a fascinating and illuminating account of the agency’s impact on American lives and landscapes.

Timothy Davis, a historian with the U.S. National Park Service, has published and lectured widely on America’s national parks. He is the coeditor, with Todd Croteau and Christopher Marston, of America’s National Park Roads and Parkways: Drawings from the Historic American Engineering Record.

Elizabeth Kryder-Reid
California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

From the publisher:
How iconic American places cultivate and conceal contested pasts California Mission Landscapes demonstrates how the gardens planted in mission courtyards over the last 150 years are not merely anachronistic but have become potent ideological spaces. Until now no book has explored the mission landscapes as an avenue into understanding the politics of the past, tracing the continuum between the Spanish colonial period, emerging American nationalism, and the contemporary heritage industry.

Elizabeth Kryder-Reid is professor of anthropology and museum studies and director of the Cultural Heritage Research Center in the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts (IUPUI) and former director of the IUPUI museum studies program.

Elizabeth Milroy
The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016

From the publisher:
Philadelphians are fond of quoting a letter in which William Penn described his vision of a “greene country towne, which will never be burnt & always wholesome.” Today, Philadelphia’s public parks cover more than ten thousand acres – roughly 11 percent of the city’s area. They encompass extensive woodlands and waterways as well as the largest collection of historic properties in the state of Pennsylvania, including the Fairmount Water Works, the Philadelphia Zoo (the oldest zoo in the United States), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Grid and the River is the product of Elizabeth Milroy’s quest to understand the history of public green spaces in William Penn’s city. In this monumental work of urban history, Milroy traces efforts to keep Philadelphia “green” from the time of its founding to the late nineteenth century. She chronicles how patterns of use and representations of green spaces informed notions of community and identity in the city. In particular, Milroy examines the history of how and why the district along the Schuylkill River came to be developed both in opposition to and in concert with William Penn’s original designations of parks in his city plan.

Focusing on both the history and representation of Philadelphia’s green spaces, and making use of a wealth of primary source materials, Milroy offers new insights into the city’s political and cultural development and documents how changing attitudes toward the natural environment affected the physical appearance of Philadelphia’s landscape and the lives of its inhabitants.

Elizabeth Milroy is Professor and Department Head of Art and Art History in the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University.

Louis P. Nelson
Architecture and Empire in Jamaica

Yale University Press, 2016

From the publisher:
Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author’s own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture.  
Nelson begins with an overview of the architecture of the West African slave trade then moves to chapters framed around types of buildings and landscapes, including the Jamaican plantation landscape and fortified houses to the architecture of free blacks. He concludes with a consideration of Jamaican architecture in Britain. By connecting the architecture of the Caribbean first to West Africa and then to Britain, Nelson traces the flow of capital and makes explicit the material, economic, and political networks around the Atlantic.  

Louis P. Nelson is professor of architectural history and associate dean for research in the School of Architecture, University of Virginia.

William E. O'Brien
Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

From the publisher:
In the postwar years, as the NAACP filed federal lawsuits that demanded park desegregation and increased pressure on park officials, southern park agencies reacted with attempts to expand segregated facilities, hoping they could demonstrate that these parks achieved the “separate but equal” standard. But the courts consistently ruled in favor of integration, leading to the end of segregated state parks by the middle of the 1960s. Even though the stories behind these largely inferior facilities faded from public awareness, the imprint of segregated state park design remains visible throughout the South.

O’Brien illuminates this untold facet of Jim Crow history in the first-ever study of segregation in southern state parks. His new book underscores the profound inequality that persisted for decades in the number, size, and quality of state parks provided for African American visitors in the Jim Crow South.

William E. O’Brien is associate professor of environmental studies at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University.

Richard E. Strassberg and Stephen H. Whiteman
Thirty-Six Views: The Kangxi Emperor’s Mountain Estate in Poetry and Prints

Harvard University Press, 2016

From the publisher:
In 1712, the Kangxi emperor published Imperial Poems on the Mountain Estate for Escaping the Heat (Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi) to commemorate his recently completed summer palace. Through his perceptions of thirty-six of its most scenic views, his poems and descriptions present an unusually intimate self-portrait of the emperor at the age of sixty that reflected the pleasures of his life there as well as his ideals as the ruler of the Qing Empire. Kangxi was closely involved in the production of the book and ordered several of his outstanding court artists – the painter Shen Yu and the engravers Zhu Gui and Mei Yufeng – to produce woodblock prints of the thirty-six views, which set a new standard for topographical illustration. He also ordered Matteo Ripa, an Italian missionary serving as a court-artist, to translate these images into the medium of copperplate engraving, which introduced this technique to China. Ripa’s hybridized interpretations soon began to circulate in Europe and influenced contemporary aesthetic debates about the nature and virtues of the Chinese garden. This artistic collaboration between a Chinese emperor and a western missionary-artist thus marked a significant moment in intercultural imagination, production, and transmission during an earlier phase of globalization.

Richard E. Strassberg is Professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Stephen H. Whiteman is Lecturer in Asian Art at the University of Sydney.

Chip Sullivan
Cartooning the Landscape

The University of Virginia Press, 2016

From the publisher:
One of the singular talents in landscape design, Chip Sullivan has shared his expertise through a seemingly unusual medium that, at second glance, makes perfect sense – the comic strip. For years Sullivan entertained readers of Landscape Architecture Magazine with comic strips that ingeniously illustrated significant concepts and milestones in the creation of our landscapes. These strips gained a large following among architects and illustrators, and now those original works, as well as additional strips created just for this book, are collected in Cartooning the Landscape.

Framed by a loose narrative in which a young man’s search for wisdom is fulfilled by a comics shop owner who instructs him not only in the essentials of illustrating but in how to see, the book takes us on a whirlwind series of journeys. We visit the living sculptures of the Tree Circus on California’s Highway 17, the vast network of tunnels and fortifications – almost an underground city – of France’s Maginot Line, and take a trip through time that reveals undeniable parallels between the Emperor Hadrian’s re-creation of the Elysian Fields and, of all things, the iconic theme parks of Walt Disney. Sullivan immerses us in the artist’s concepts and tools, from the Claude mirror and the camera obscura to the role of optical illusion in art. He shows us how hot air balloons introduced aerial perspective and reveals exhibition effects that portended everything from Cinerama to Smell-O-Vision.

Sullivan’s book is also a plea, in an era increasingly dominated by digitally rendered images, for a new appreciation of the art of hand drawing. The proof of this craft’s value lies in the hundreds of Sullivan’s panels collected in this passionate, humorous, always illuminating tour of the rich landscape surrounding us.

Chip Sullivan is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a winner of the Rome Prize and the author of the classic Drawing the Landscape, now in its fourth edition.

Jack Williams
Easy On, Easy Off: The Urban Pathology of America’s Small Towns

The University of Virginia Press, 2016

From the publisher:
Life outside our nation’s big cities comprises a remarkably rich aspect of America – culturally, historically, and physically. Because of the way we move through the country, however – on roads built for maximum expediency – most of us are rarely if ever exposed to these small communities, a trend that is moving these towns dangerously far off the maps of commerce and public consciousness.

In Easy On, Easy Off, Jack Williams takes to the roads of the interstate highway system to explore America’s small towns, bringing back diverse examples of both beautiful and neglected places that illustrate how shifts in modern transportation have influenced urban form. Most of these communities are little known beyond their discrete regions, yet their struggles to prosper are universal. Mill towns, county-seat court squares, villages of the Great Plains, mining towns, and California's forgotten Chinese settlements all share similar fates – overshadowed by interstate off-ramp towns and bypassed by high-speed traffic.

Employing more than 150 historic maps and images, unique drawings, and contemporary photographs, Williams convincingly argues that irreversible changes have overtaken the landscapes of small-town America, with each community’s economic and social vitality slowly shifting away to other commercial places that attach to our highway interchanges and extrude into strip malls. A tale of success perhaps for the highway system, the more urgent story relayed in Easy On, Easy Off is of the loss of the complex fabric of thousands of small towns that once defined this nation.

Jack Williams is Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture at Auburn University and the author of East 40 Degrees: An Interpretive Atlas (Virginia).

Anthony Acciavatti
Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River

Applied Research + Design Publishing, 2015

Beyond the dense urbanism of Mumbai (Bombay) or the IT centers of Bangalore and Hyderabad lies the Ganges River basin – today home to over one-quarter of India's billion-plus population – a space historically defined by a mythological constellation of terrestrial sites imbued with mythological, celestial significance. Not only is it one of the most densely populated river basins in the world but it also undergoes dramatic physical changes with the onslaught of the wet monsoon, when over one meter of rain falls in the span of three months. Focusing on the intersection of these two observations, this book is an atlas of built and unbuilt projects designed to transform the river into a hydrological system best described as a supersurface: a surface engineered at every level, from the scale of the soil to the scale of the nation.

Anthony Acciavatti, architect and principal of Somatic-Collaborative in New York City, is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the History of Science Program in the Department of History at Princeton University.

Charles E. Beveridge, Lauren Meier, and Irene Mills
Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015

With more than 470 images, of which 129 are in color – Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks portrays seventy landscapes, including parks, parkways, park systems, and scenic reservations, designed by the father of landscape architecture in America. Sketches, studies, lithographs, paintings, historical photographs, and written descriptions provide tours of such notable landscapes as Central Park, Prospect Park, the Buffalo Park and Parkway System, Washington Park and Jackson Park in Chicago, Boston’s "Emerald Necklace," and Mount Royal in Montreal, Quebec.

Charles E. Beveridge, professor emeritus at American University, is series editor of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted and author of Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape.

Lauren Meier, a landscape architect specializing in historic preservation practice, is coeditor of The Master List of Design Projects of the Olmsted Firm 1857-1979.

Irene Mills, a former military officer with master’s degrees in electrical engineering and landscape architecture, helped produce the George Washington Parkway Cultural Landscape Report for the National Park Service.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens

University of California Press, 2014

Gardens are immobile, literally rooted in the earth, but they are also shaped by migration and by the transnational movement of ideas, practices, plants, and seeds. In Paradise Transplanted, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo reveals how successive conquests and diverse migrations have created Southern California gardens, and in turn how gardens influence social inequality, work, leisure, status, and the experience of nature and community. Drawing on historical archival research, ethnography, and over one hundred interviews with a wide range of people including suburban homeowners, paid Mexican immigrant gardeners, botanical garden professionals, and immigrant community gardeners in inner-city Los Angeles, this book offers insights into the ways that diverse global migrations and garden landscapes shape society.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California, where she also serves as associate director of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration.

Mark Laird
A Natural History of English Gardening

Yale University Press, 2015

Inspired by the pioneering naturalist Gilbert White, who viewed natural history as the common study of cultural and natural communities, Mark Laird unearths forgotten historical data to reveal the complex visual cultures of early modern gardening. Ranging from climate studies to the study of a butterfly’s life cycle, he examines the scientific quest for order in nature as an offshoot of ordering the garden and field. In doing so, he follows a broad series of chronological events to probe the nature of gardening and husbandry, the role of amateurs in scientific disciplines, and the contribution of women as gardener-naturalists. Illustrated by a wealth of visual and literary materials – paintings, engravings, poetry, essays, and letters, as well as prosaic household accounts and nursery bills – Laird fundamentally transforms our understanding of the English landscape garden as an expression of cultural history.

Mark Laird is a historic landscape consultant and garden conservator and teaches landscape history at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.

Finola O’Kane
Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting, and Tourism, 1700-1840

Yale University Press, 2013

That Ireland is picturesque is a well-worn cliché, but little is understood of how this perception was created, painted, and manipulated during the long 18th eighteenth century. This book positions Ireland at the core of the Picturesque's development and argues for a far greater degree of Irish influence on the course of European landscape theory and design. Positioned off-axis from the greater force-field, and off-shore from mainland Europe and America, where better to cultivate the oblique perspective? This book charts the creation of picturesque Ireland while also exploring in detail the role and reach of landscape painting in the planning, publishing, landscaping, and design of Ireland's historic landscapes, towns, and tourist routes. Thus it is also a history of the physical shaping of Ireland as a tourist destination, one of the earliest, most calculated, and most successful in the world.

Finola O’Kane is a lecturer in the School of Architecture, Landscape and Civil Engineering, University College Dublin.

Robert Riley
The Camaro in the Pasture: Speculations on the Cultural Landscape of America

University of Virginia Press, 2015

Robert Riley has been a renowned figure in landscape studies for over fifty years, valued for his perceptive, learned, and highly entertaining articles, reviews, and essays. Many of Riley's essays were originally published in Landscape, the magazine founded by John Brinckerhoff Jackson, for which Riley subsequently served as editor. The Camaro in the Pasture is the first book to collect this compelling author’s writing. With diverse topics ranging from science-fiction fantasies to problems of academic design research, the essays in this volume cover an entire half-century of Riley’s observations on the American landscape. The essays – several of which are new or previously unpublished – interpret changing rationales for urban beautification, the evolution and transformation of the strip, the development of a global landscape of golf and resorts replacing that replaced an older search for exoticism, and the vernacular landscape as wallpaper rather than quilt. Ultimately, Riley envisions our future landscape as a rapidly fluctuating electronic net draped over the more slowly changing and familiar land- and building-based system. Throughout, Riley emphasizes the vernacular landscape of contemporary America – how we have shaped and use it, what it is becoming, and, above all, how we experience it.

Robert B. Riley, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture and Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is coeditor, with Terence Young, of Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations.

R. Bruce Stephenson
John Nolen: Landscape Architect and City Planner

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

awards_jackson_2016_pic7.pngJohn Nolen (1869–1937) was the first American to identify himself exclusively as a town and city planner. In 1903, at the age of thirty-four, he enrolled in the new Harvard University program in landscape architecture, studying under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Arthur Shurcliff. Two years later, he opened his own office in Harvard Square.  
Over the course of his career, Nolen and his firm completed more than four hundred projects, including comprehensive plans for more than twenty-five cities, across the United States. Like other progressive reformers of his era, Nolen looked to Europe for models to structure the rapid urbanization defining modern life into more efficient and livable form. His books, including New Towns for Old: Achievements in Civic Improvement in Some American Small Towns and Neighborhoods, promoted the new practice of city planning and were widely influential.  
In this insightful biography, R. Bruce Stephenson analyzes the details of Nolen's many experiments, illuminating the planning principles he used in laying out communities from Mariemont, Ohio, to Venice, Florida. Stephenson concludes by discussing the potential of Nolen's work as a model of a sustainable vision relevant to American civic culture today.

Bruce Stephenson, Ph.D., has worked as a public planner, consultant, and professor. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of regional planning, environmental protection, and urbanism. He has written three books and more than forty editorials in a range of professional journals. His latest book, John Nolen, Urban Planner, Landscape Architect and City Planner, informed his consultancy for the Winter Park SunRail Station and the Genius Preserve and earned the 1000 Friends of Florida Community Betterment Award.

Ron Williams
Landscape Architecture in Canada

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014

The largest and most pervasive of human artifacts, landscapes are both cultural expressions and environments that shape our actions. Playgrounds, cemeteries, memorials, historic sites, public squares, gardens, industrial rehabilitation sites, wild national parks, and manicured urban parks provide the settings for work, recreation, commerce, memorialization, and mourning and shape the experience and meaning of these activities in Canada. In the first critical history of designed landscapes in that country, Ron Williams approaches landscape architecture as a social art that creates places for people to use and as an environmental art through which practitioners act as stewards of the natural world.

Ron Williams, formerly a longtime longtime professor and former director of the School of Landscape Architecture at the Université de Montréal, is a practicing architect and landscape architect.

Patricia Bouchenot-Déchin and Georges Farhat
André Le Notre in Perspective

Yale University Press, 2014

André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), principal gardener to Louis XIV, was France’s greatest landscape and garden designer. The parks he created at Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles are the supreme examples of seventeenth-century French garden design. He also created the central promenade of the Tuileries, which would become the grand axis of Paris. André Le Nôtre in Perspective sheds new light on the royal gardener’s life and his practice as a landscape architect, engineer, and art collector. It highlights his achievements, and at the same time, enhances our understanding of the French classical garden as an enduring influence on landscape design. Comprehensive, impeccably researched, and supplemented by illustrations of original documents and drawings, it brings together the scholarship of some of the world’s leading experts in early modern art, gardens, and allied fields.

Patricia Bouchenot-Déchin is a Research Associate at the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles and Laboratoire de l’École d’Architecture de Versailles. Georges Farhat is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and a founding member of the Laboratoire de l’École d’Architecture de Versailles.

Vittoria Di Palma
Wasteland: A History

Yale University Press, 2014

In Wasteland Vittoria Di Palma takes on the “anti-picturesque,” offering an account of landscapes that have drawn fear and contempt. Di Palma argues that a convergence of beliefs, technologies, institutions, and individuals in eighteenth-century England resulted in the formulation of cultural attitudes that continue to shape the ways in which we evaluate landscape today. Staking claims on the aesthetics of disgust, she addresses how emotional response has been central to the development of ideas about nature, beauty, and sublimity. She tackles our conceptions of hostile territories such as swamps, mountains, and forests, arguing that they are united not by physical characteristics but by the aversive reactions they inspire. With striking illustrations of husbandry manuals, radical pamphlets, gardening treatises, maps, and landscape paintings, Wasteland spans the fields of history, landscape studies, art and architectural history, geography, and the history of science and technology.

Vittoria Di Palma is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture of the University of Southern California.

Sonja Dümpelmann
Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design

University of Virginia Press, 2014

The dawn of aviation ushered in radically new ways for architects, landscape designers, urban planners, geographers, and archaeologists to look at cities and landscapes. Professionals of the built environment awoke to the possibilities offered by electrifying aerial perspectives and airports as sites of design. In Flights of Imagination, Sonja Dümpelmann illustrates how design professionals understood the aerial view as simultaneously abstract and experiential, detailed and contextual, harmful and essential. She discusses landscape design and planning activities that were motivated, legitimized, and facilitated by the novel perspective, and shows how viewing the earth from above redirected attention toward bodily experience on the ground. Tracing the evolution of airports, she describes how they were conceived as landscapes and cities, and explores contemporary plans to turn decommissioned airports into urban public parks.

Sonja Dümpelmann, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University, is the coeditor, with Dorothee Brantz, of Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century.

Marion Harney
Place-Making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill

Ashgate, 2013

Characterized by his contemporaries as a “man of taste,” Whig politician, author, publisher, and antiquarian Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717–1797), created Strawberry Hill, his villa and garden beside the Thames in Twickenham, as a place of private resonances, pleasure, and entertainment. In Place-Making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill, Marion Harney explains how this celebrated creation melding historic, visual, and sensory modes of perception can be interpreted autobiographically to explicate the aesthetic theories and values of its maker. She argues that Walpole was the first person to define the Gothic style and that his 1780 text, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, is a pioneering attempt to describe past styles and articulate contemporary garden theory. Her description of Walpole’s villa and its associated grounds shows how Strawberry Hill serves an example of the new English style of landscape design.

Marion Harney is Director of Studies, Conservation of Historic Gardens and Cultural Landscapes at the University of Bath, UK.

Susan Herrington
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape

University of Virginia Press, 2014

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is one of the most important landscape architects working today, yet few outside the field know her name. By placing her within a larger social and aesthetic context and chronicling both her personal and professional trajectory, Susan Herrington has remedied a serious lacuna in the history of modernist landscape design. She offers the first biography of this adventurous and influential landscape architect who fled Nazi Germany at the age of eighteen and then became one of the few women of her day to graduate from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape draws upon archival research, site analyses, and numerous interviews with Oberlander and her collaborators. Oberlander's socially responsible and ecologically sensitive public landscapes in New York, Philadelphia, Vancouver, Seattle, Berlin, Toronto, and Montreal are thoroughly explored.

Susan Herrington is Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia and the author most recently of On Landscapes.

Jared Farmer 
Trees in Paradise: A California History

W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

California has more trees now than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is the work of history, not nature. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to alter the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities. They imported the blue green eucalyptus whose tangy fragrance was thought to cure malaria. They built a lucrative industry on the sweet juice and thick skin of the Washington navel orange. They lined their streets with graceful palm trees.

Yet California’s new landscape proved to be no paradise. By 1900 timber firms owned the entire redwood forest; by 1950 they had clear-cut almost all of the old-growth trees. The eucalyptuses in the Berkeley hills exploded in fire; the orange groves near Riverside froze on cold nights; Los Angeles’s palm trees harbored rats and dropped heavy fronds on the streets below. Disease, infestation, and development all spelled the decline of the nonnative redwood. In the north, however, a new forest of second-growth trees took root, nurtured by protective laws and sustainable harvesting. Today there are more California redwoods than there were a century ago.

Trees in Paradise chronicles the history of the making of California verdant from roots to canopy. Rich in character and story, it is a compelling narrative that offers a new and insightful perspective on the history of the Golden State and the American West.

Francis R. Kowsky
The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System

University of Massachusetts Press and Library of American Landscape History, 2013

Beginning in 1868, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux created a series of parks and parkways for Buffalo, New York, that drew national and international attention. The improvements augmented the city’s original plan with urban-design features inspired by Second Empire Paris, including the first system of “parkways” to grace an American city.

Olmsted and Vaux dissolved their historic partnership in 1872, but Olmsted continued his association with the Queen City of the Lakes, designing additional parks and laying out important sites within the growing metropolis. When Niagara Falls was threatened by industrial development, he led a campaign to protect this scenic treasure, and in 1885 he succeeded in persuading New York to create the Niagara Reservation, the present Niagara Falls State Park. Two years later, Olmsted and Vaux teamed up again, this time to create a plan for the area around the falls.

Francis R. Kowksy illuminates this remarkable constellation of projects, utilizing plans, drawings, photographs, reports, and letters. He brings a new perspective to the vast undertaking, analyzing it as a cohesive expression of the visionary landscape and planning principles that Olmsted and Vaux pioneered.

Joseph Manca
George Washington’s Eye: Landscape, Architecture, and Design at Mount Vernon

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

George Washington believed that character was inextricably linked to morality and social concerns. His house, gardens, and art collection – and his writings about them – reflected his desire to serve as an exemplar of this philosophy as well as his need to live a rational, tranquil, and harmonious life.

In examining how Washington’s values shaped the material culture of Mount Vernon, art historian Joseph Manca offers a complete picture of its moral, stylistic, and historical attributes. He examines the man behind its design, portraying a statesman who was deeply influenced by his wide travels throughout colonial America; a connoisseur who had broad architectural knowledge and an informed aesthetic philosophy. Based on a careful study of Washington’s diaries and correspondence and the lively accounts of visitors, this richly illustrated book introduces a side of the Founding Father unfamiliar to many readers – the avid art collector, amateur architect, and, along with Thomas Jefferson, the leading landscape designer of his time.

Karen M’Closkey
Unearthed: The Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013

In Unearthed Karen M’Closkey uses Hargreaves Associates’ portfolio to illustrate the challenges and opportunities of designing public spaces. Founded by George Hargreaves in 1983, this landscape architectural firm has transformed numerous abandoned sites into topographically and functionally diverse parks. Its body of work reflects the socioeconomic and legislative changes that have impacted landscape architecture over the past three decades. The firm’s longstanding interest in transforming industrial sites has necessitated frequent contact with communities and local authorities. As political, social, and economic terrains, these landscapes offer the opportunity to reflect on larger issues in urban redevelopment.

Illustrated with more than one hundred and fifty color and black-and-white images, this groundbreaking scholarly examination of the firm’s philosophy and body of work explores the methods behind such projects as San Francisco’s Crissy Field, the Louisville Waterfront Park, the 21st Century Waterfront in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and London’s 2012 Olympic Park. M’Closkey outlines how Hargreaves and longtime associate Mary Margaret Jones approach the design of public places – conceptually, materially, and formally – on sites that require significant remaking to support ecological and social needs.

Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove
Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City

The Monacelli Press, 2013

Paradise Planned is the definitive history of the development of the garden suburb, which originated in England in the late-eighteenth century, was quickly adopted in the United States and northern Europe, and gradually spread throughout the world. Such neighborhoods promised a bucolic lifestyle, typically outside a city, but accessible by streetcar, train, and automobile.

Today the principles of the garden-city movement are once again in play as the retrofitting of suburbs has become a central issue in planning. Strategies are emerging that reflect the original goal of the garden suburb: the creation of a metropolitan community that embraces both the intensity of the city and tranquility of nature.

Paradise Planned is the comprehensive, encyclopedic record of this movement, a vital contribution to architectural and planning history, and an essential resource for guiding the repair of the American townscape.

Mireille Galinou
Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb

Yale University Press, 2011

The garden suburb has its origins in London, and, contrary to widespread belief, its earliest phase took place not with the much discussed garden-city movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, but a century earlier, with the creation of the Eyre brothers’ villa estate in the London suburb of St. John’s Wood. Drawing on the resources of the newly catalogued Eyre archive, Mireille Galinou describes how London acquired one of its most attractive and influential suburbs and how generations of the Eyre family shaped, fought over, lost, and revitalized their inheritance. Little did they know that they were making world history with their winning formula, which set the green-suburb agenda for middle classes around the world.

Mireille Galinou is a freelance arts and museums consultant. She is the coauthor (with John Hayes) of London in Paint: Catalogue of Oil Paintings in the Collection of the Museum of London (1996). In 2004 she organized for the City of London a series of conferences on the artistic patronage of London’s merchants. Subsequently she edited City Merchants and the Arts 1670–1720 (2004).

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town

Yale University Press, 2012

Modern-day London abounds with a multitude of gardens, enclosed by railings and surrounded by houses, which attest to the English love of nature. These green enclaves, known as squares, are among the most distinctive and admired features of the metropolis and are England’s greatest contribution to the development of European town planning and urban form. Traditionally inhabitants who overlooked these gated communal gardens paid for their maintenance and had special access to them. As such, they have long been synonymous with privilege, elegance, and prosperous metropolitan living. They epitomize the classical notion of rus in urbe, the integration of nature within the urban plan – a concept that continues to shape cities to this day.

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan delves into the history, evolution, and social implications of squares, which have been an important element in the planning and expansion of London since the early seventeenth century. As an amenity that fosters health and well-being and a connection to the natural world, the square has played a crucial role in the development of the English capital.

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a landscape architect and historian based in London. He is gardens adviser to the Royal Palaces, president of the London Parks and Gardens Trust, editor of The London Gardener, and the author of several books, including The London Town Garden 1700–1840 (2001) and The Gardens and Parks at Hampton Court Palace (2005). He recently redesigned the gardens of Kensington Palace in London to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

David Coke and Alan Borg
Vauxhall Gardens

Yale University Press, 2011

From its early beginnings in the Restoration until the final closure in Queen Victoria’s reign, Vauxhall Gardens developed from a rural tavern and place of assignation into a dreamworld filled with visual arts and music, and finally into a commercial site of mass entertainment. By the eighteenth century, Vauxhall was crucial to the cultural and fashionable life of the country, patronized by all levels of society from royal dukes to penurious servants.

In the first book on the subject for over fifty years, Alan Borg and David E. Coke reveal the teeming life, the spectacular art, and the ever-present music of Vauxhall in fascinating detail. Borg and Coke’s historical exposition of the entire history of the gardens makes a major contribution to the study of London entertainments, art, music, sculpture, class, and ideology. It reveals how Vauxhall linked high and popular culture in ways that look forward to the manner in which both art and entertainment have evolved in modern times.

David E. Coke was formerly the curator of Gainsborough’s House Trust, Sudbury, Suffolk, and director of Pallant House Gallery Trust, Chichester. Alan Borg is a former director of two of Britain’s national museums, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Imperial War Museum. He lives in London.

Lawrence Halprin, with foreword by Laurie Olin
A Life Spent Changing Places

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011

“The remark that ‘every great artist inhabits a genre and remakes it’ could find no better proof than in...the life and work [of Lawrence Halprin]. He produced a series of masterpieces of iconic stature: Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco; Sea Ranch on the north California coast; the Lovejoy and Ira Keller Fountain sequence in Portland, Oregon; Freeway Park in Seattle, Washington; the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.; and Stern Grove Theater in San Francisco, to name some of the best known. He knew plants horticulturally and could use them architecturally. Many of his greatest works were executed with humble, ordinary building materials: concrete, asphalt, stucco, wood, soil, and plants. [His ideas have] been so heavily copied and thoroughly absorbed into the vernacular of late twentieth-century urban development that they now appear as cliché. At the time, however, he and his staff were designing and building a new kind of public space.” – Laurie Olin, from the Foreword

Landscape architect, urban planner, teacher, and social visionary: over the course of a sixty-year career, Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009) reshaped the spaces we inhabit and our ways of moving through them. The New York Times called him “the tribal elder of American landscape architecture” and the critic Ada Louise Huxtable credited him with creating what “may be one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.” With his bold use of abstract imagery, he could evoke the landscape of the American West in a sequence of city squares and fountains, while his plan for repurposing an abandoned factory near San Francisco‘s Fisherman’s Wharf showed how adaptive use of a historic structure could turn commercial development into urban theater. A man who deeply loved cities, he left as one of his most important legacies the five thousand acres of coastline, hedgerows, and meadows that became Sonoma County’s environmentally sensitive and enormously influential Sea Ranch.

Featuring more than ninety black-and-white and one hundred color reproductions of photographs, plans, and sketchbooks, A Life Spent Changing Places is Halprin’s own account of how a young boy who listened to the fireside chats of Franklin D. Roosevelt on the radio became the man who designed the memorial to that president in the nation’s capital. It is a book about the invention and reinvention of an extraordinary man over the span of decades and how that man helped to reframe the world around him.

Lawrence Halprin began his professional career in San Francisco in 1949. His work over the next sixty years spanned the country from Oregon to Virginia.

Laurie Olin is practice professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and principal of the Olin Partnership, a landscape architecture firm in Philadelphia.

Eugenia W. Herbert
Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011

“I found myself entertained on every page. Herbert’s achievement is that under the guise of a study of Britannia’s role as gardener she has written a thoroughly scholarly – indeed, groundbreaking, in every sense of the word – history of the British entanglement in India. She has flung her net far and wide, and drawn in a wealth of unfamiliar sources, both exotic and homely, to build up a rich tapestry of the Indian landscape. . . . Full of insights and wonderfully readable, Flora’s Empire is as much a treat for the general reader as it is for those who relish ‘the glory of the garden.’“ – Charles Allen, editor of Plain Tales from the Raj

Like their penchant for clubs, cricket, and hunting, the planting of English gardens by the British in India reflected an understandable need on the part of expatriates to replicate home as much as possible in an alien environment. In Flora’s Empire, Eugenia W. Herbert argues that more than simple nostalgia or homesickness lay at the root of this “garden imperialism,” however. Drawing on a wealth of period illustrations and personal accounts, many of them little known, she traces the significance of gardens in the long history of British relations with the subcontinent. To British eyes, she demonstrates, India was an untamed land that needed the visible stamp of civilization that gardens in their many guises could convey.

Colonial gardens changed over time, from the “garden houses” of eighteenth-century nabobs modeled on English country estates to the herbaceous borders, gravel walks, and well-trimmed lawns of Victorian civil servants. As the British extended their rule, they found that hill stations like Simla offered an ideal retreat from the unbearable heat of the plains and a place to coax English flowers into bloom. Furthermore, India was traversed by the global network of botanical explorers and collectors whose members gathered up the world’s plants for transport to great imperial centers such as Kew. And it is through colonial gardens that one may track the evolution of imperial ideas of governance. Every Government House and Residency was carefully landscaped to reflect the current ideals of an ordered society. At independence in 1947, the British left behind a lasting legacy in their gardens, one still reflected in the design of parks and information-technology campuses and in the horticultural practices of home gardeners who continue to send away to England for seeds.

Eugenia W. Herbert is professor emeritus of history at Mount Holyoke College and the author of several books, including Twilight on the Zambezi: Late Colonialism in Central.

Bianca Maria Rinaldi
The Chinese Garden: Garden Types for Contemporary Landscape Architecture

Birkhäuser, 2011

The Chinese Garden shows us the world’s distinguished historical and modern gardens in their essential compositional principles from the perspective of contemporary landscaping. It is an inspirational and comprehensive work that offers a huge variety of pictures, maps, and drawings.

The panorama of The Chinese Garden stretches from surviving historical gardens all the way to such modern examples as the garden at the Bank of China in Hong Kong, designed by I. M. Pei; Ai Weiwei’s Yiwu Riverbank Park in Jinhua, China; the Garden of Flowering Fragrance in the area of Los Angeles, California; and the Garden of Awakening Orchids in Portland, Oregon.

Bianca Maria Rinaldi is assistant professor for landscape architecture at the School of Architecture and Design, University of Camerino, Italy.

Kirk Savage
Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape

University of California Press, 2011

The National Mall in Washington, D.C., is “a great public space, as essential a part of the American landscape as the Grand Canyon,” according to architecture critic Paul Goldberger, but few realize how recent, fragile, and contested this achievement is. In Monument Wars, Kirk Savage tells the Mall’s engrossing story – its historic plan, the structures that populate its corridors, and the sea change it reveals regarding national representation. Central to this narrative is a dramatic shift from the nineteenth-century concept of a decentralized landscape, or “ground,” with heroic statues spread out in traffic circles and picturesque parks, to the twentieth-century ideal of “space,” in which authority is concentrated in an intensified center, and the monument is transformed from an object of reverence to a space of experience. Savage’s lively and intelligent analysis traces the re-envisioning of the monuments themselves: there is a shift from the image of a single man, often on horseback, to commemorations of common soldiers or citizens; from monuments that celebrate victory and heroism to memorials honoring victims. An indispensable guide to the National Mall, Monument Wars provides a fresh and fascinating perspective on over two hundred years of American history.

Kirk Savage is professor and chair, Department of the History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh.

Therese O’Malley, with contributions by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid and Anne L. Helmreich
Keywords in American Landscape Design

Yale University Press, 2010

This beautifully illustrated historical dictionary of landscape-design vocabulary used in North America from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century defines one hundred terms and concepts related to garden planning and landscape architecture. From alcove, arbor, and arch to veranda, wilderness, and wood, each entry includes a wealth of documentation, textual sources, and imagery. The broad geographic scope of the support material reveals patterns of regional usage, while the chronological range provides evidence of changing design practice and landscape vocabulary over time. Drawing upon a rich assortment of newly compiled documents and accompanied by more than one thousand images, this dictionary forms the most complete published reference to date on the history of American garden design, and reveals landscape history as integral to the study of American cultural history.

Katherine Wentworth Rinne
The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City

Yale University Press, 2011

In this pioneering study of the water infrastructure of Renaissance Rome, urban historian Katherine Rinne offers a new understanding of how technological and scientific developments in aqueduct and fountain architecture helped turn a medieval backwater into the preeminent city of early modern Europe. Supported by the author’s extensive topographical research, this book presents a unified vision of the city that links improvements to public and private water systems with political, religious, and social change. Between 1560 and 1630, in a spectacular burst of urban renewal, Rome’s religious and civil authorities sponsored the construction of aqueducts; private and public fountains for drinking, washing, and industry; and the magnificent ceremonial fountains that are Rome’s glory. Rinne explores the technological, sociopolitical, and artistic questions that the designers faced during a turbulent age when the authority of the Catholic Church was threatened and the infrastructure of the city in a state of decay. She shows how these public works projects transformed Rome in a successful marriage of innovative engineering and strategic urban planning.

Udo Weilacher
Syntax of Landscape: The Landscape Architecture of Peter Latz and Partners

Birkhäuser Architecture, 2007

For Udo Weilacher the term “syntax of landscape” entails reading the different layers and meanings of historically charged locations through visual linkages to a network of spatial and temporal references. To exemplify this process he has chosen several landscapes designed by Peter Latz and Partners, including the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, the Plateau de Kirchberg in Luxembourg, and the Dora Park in Turin. He discusses the way in which these and other works by the firm represent an intelligent use of alternative environmental technologies and function as renewable reconstructions of entire industrial landscapes. He also explores the aesthetic language that makes these spaces seem timeless.

Special Recognition

Geoff Winningham
Traveling the Shore of the Spanish Sea: The Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico

TAMU Press, 2010

In Traveling the Shore of the Spanish Sea, photographer Geoff Winningham has created a travel journal with more than two hundred images of the volcanoes, rain forests, and steep mountains of the southern coast of Veracruz and the salt marshes along the Texas coast near High Island. His discussion of the role that the Gulf of Mexico played in the discovery and exploration of the New World gives the book a historical dimension, and his photographs depicting both pristine and despoiled landscapes show the region’s great natural beauty while awakening environmental concern.